Cullen: A look at NHL teams by draft history

{eot}

Scott Cullen6/27/2014 12:29:24 PM

Text Size

As a fun NHL Draft exercise, I decided to go through each NHL team and re-configure their rosters, only allowing teams to include players that were drafted by the team. In order to keep the roster numbers up, those that were undrafted free agents were included with the teams for which they played their first NHL games.

Take it easy, agents. This isn't about removing trades or free agency -- those are some of my favourite parts of the game too -- but it's about how teams identify and secure talent and which teams have done these things more effectively.

As you can see, by looking through these hypoethetical depth charts, there are teams that have provided a disproportionate number of the players throughout the league. Certainly, some teams have had and used more draft picks than other teams, so that's part of the reason why they bring so much more talent into the league, but there's probably a lesson to be gleaned from that as well.

On the other hand, there are teams that have had a hard time bringing in defencemen, like the Philadelphia Flyers, who have preferred (or been forced) to acquire their defencemen through other means. Dennis Seidenberg and Joni Pitkanen are the two best active NHL defencemen that the Flyers have drafted and Pitkanen missed all of last season due to injury while Seidenberg missed half the year. Of course, the Flyers have had brought in (and subsequently let go) some serious talent up front, including Patrick Sharp, Justin Williams, Mike Richards and Jeff Carter, among others, but their hypoethetical forward depth chart is impressive.

Sometimes, circumstances have made it that a team doesn't need to draft at a position. Think of the Boston Bruins' goaltending situation recently, carried by Tuukka Rask (acquired in trade) and, before him, Tim Thomas (a Quebec Nordiques draft pick!), so -- at least prior to drafting Malcolm Subban in the first round -- the Bruins haven't brought in a lot of blue-chippers in net.